Long-Term Visual Object Tracking Benchmark

We propose a new long video dataset (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and benchmark for single object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 HD videos from real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long sequences and (b) the accuracy of trackers abruptly drops on challenging long sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction of long-term tracking.Comment: ACCV 2018 (Oral

Meta-Tracker: Fast and Robust Online Adaptation for Visual Object Trackers

This paper improves state-of-the-art visual object trackers that use online adaptation. Our core contribution is an offline meta-learning-based method to adjust the initial deep networks used in online adaptation-based tracking. The meta learning is driven by the goal of deep networks that can quickly be adapted to robustly model a particular target in future frames. Ideally the resulting models focus on features that are useful for future frames, and avoid overfitting to background clutter, small parts of the target, or noise. By enforcing a small number of update iterations during meta-learning, the resulting networks train significantly faster. We demonstrate this approach on top of the high performance tracking approaches: tracking-by-detection based MDNet and the correlation based CREST. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, OTB2015 and VOT2016, show that our meta-learned versions of both trackers improve speed, accuracy, and robustness.Comment: Code: https://github.com/silverbottlep/meta_tracker

Generative Adversarial Networks for Online Visual Object Tracking Systems

Object Tracking is one of the essential tasks in computer vision domain as it has numerous applications in various fields, such as human-computer interaction, video surveillance, augmented reality, and robotics. Object Tracking refers to the process of detecting and locating the target object in a series of frames in a video. The state-of-the-art for tracking-by-detection framework is typically made up of two steps to track the target object. The first step is drawing multiple samples near the target region of the previous frame. The second step is classifying each sample as either the target object or the background. Visual object tracking remains one of the most challenging task due to variations in visual data such as target occlusion, background clutter, illumination changes, scale changes, as well as challenges stem from the tracking problem including fast motion, out of view, motion blur, deformation, and in and out planar rotation. These challenges continue to be tackled by researchers as they investigate more effective algorithms that are able to track any object under various changing conditions. To keep the research community motivated, there are several annual tracker benchmarking competitions organized to consolidate performance measures and evaluation protocols in different tracking subfields such as Visual Object Tracking VOT challenges and The Multiple Object Tracking MOT Challenges [1, 2]. Despite the excellent performance achieved with deep learning, modern deep tracking methods are still limited in several aspects. The variety of appearance changes over time remains a problem for deep trackers, owing to spatial overlap between positive samples. Furthermore, existing methods require high computational load and suffer from slow running speed. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown excellent results in solving a variety of computer vision problems, making them attractive in investigating their potential use in achieving better results in other computer vision applications, namely, visual object tracking. In this thesis, we explore the impact of using Residual Network ResNet as an alternative feature extractor to Visual Geometry Group VGG which is commonly used in literature. Furthermore, we attempt to address the limitations of object tracking by exploiting the ongoing advancement in Generative Adversarial Networks. We describe a generative adversarial network intended to improve the tracker’s classifier during the online training phase. The network generates adaptive masks to augment the positive samples detected by the convolutional layer of the tracker’s model in order to improve the model’s classifier by making the samples more difficult. Then we integrate this network with Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Network (MDNet) tracker and present the results. Furthermore, we introduce a novel tracker, MDResNet, by substituting the convolutional layers of MDNet that were originally taken from Visual Geometry Group (VGG-M) network with layers taken from Residual Deep Network (ResNet-50) and the results are compared. We also introduce a new tracker, Region of Interest with Adversarial Learning (ROIAL), by integrating the generative adversarial network with the Real-Time Multi-Domain Convolutional Network (RT-MDNet) tracker. We also integrate the GAN network with MDResNet and MDNet and compare the results with ROIAL